LSI SAS 2008 (mfi) on SuperMicro X8SI6-F

Kenneth D. Merry ken at freebsd.org
Fri Feb 18 16:49:41 UTC 2011


On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 11:07:21 -0800, Rumen Telbizov wrote:
> Hello Damien, list:
> 
> I've been following this discussion with great interest and I hope the
> result of it
> will be the merge of a stable driver in STABLE branch soon.
> 
> I brought this not a long ago (
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-January/061237.html)
> and I was hoping to have this driver in 8.x before 8.3 release.

It is in -stable now, and so should be in 8.3.  We didn't make it in time
for 8.2 unfortunately.

> > What is sad is that these controllers are becoming very mainstream now,
> > we're getting them more and more on Dell servers , and the fbsd project
> > still struggles with them (for reasons I don't know, might be LSI's
> > fault, might be a lack of resources or interest...)
> >
> 
> I couldn't agree more. I've been testing those (9211-8i) myself here on a
> bunch of SuperMicro
> servers and I'd say that I am very pleased with the performance of those
> HBAs (not the mention the
> price ~$230-250 CAD). On a 12 x SAS disks with a direct attached backplane
> 826A (6Gbit SAS2.0)
> in RAID0 across all of them (md linux software raid) I was able to squeeze *
> 2.1GBytes/s* sequential write
> (dd kind of style write). With the same setup and SATA disks I get to
> 1.2GByte/s. I did use 2 controllers
> to accomodate ports for all the disks. I get the same speed with ZFS and
> 9.0-CURRENT.
> 
> On a related note I must say that I do have serious problems with the
> bandwidth when I use
> the SAS expander version of this backplane (826E26) (I cannot get more than
> 200-250 MBytes/s).
> I've been investigating this problem with LSI's help and still no
> conclusion. It looks like I am using
> only one channel.
> 
> Anyway this was just my humble attempt to encourage the MFC of this driver.
> I think the card is
> pretty good. I'd like to hear other people's opinion on this HBA though.

MFC is done, try it out and let me know if there are any problems.

Thanks,

Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken at FreeBSD.ORG


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